Indoor and outdoor positioning are beneficial in multiple use cases such as:
Indoor Navigation/Outdoor Navigation;
Indoor Wayfinding/Outdoor Wayfinding;
Proximity marketing;
Big data analytics;
In-building space utilization;
Safety and security;
People, animals and asset tracking;
Command and control.
Real time location estimation enables businesses to better understand the behavior of their employees and customers. It also allows businesses to efficiently utilize their assets. It brings social and commercial values to the customers and resolves their daily life matters.
Currently, multiple indoor and outdoor positioning technologies and standards are used in the market. Indoor positioning technologies require an infrastructure to be installed in the indoor location before a location estimation algorithm can operate. Those technologies are Wi-Fi hotspots, Bluetooth beacons, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons, Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) transceivers, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) transceivers, ZigBee transceivers among others. The latter technologies and standards can only function when hotspots, beacons (such as the ibeacon from Apple, and Eddystone from Google's Android, for example), transceivers or readers are installed in fixed locations in the indoor/outdoor facility (in-building, multiple floors, multiple rooms and indoor/outdoor spaces). Some technologies additionally require the availability of indoor floor civil plans as well (indoor maps).
An Allied Business Intelligence (ABI—https://www.abiresearch.com/) research in 2017 shows that the average infrastructure cost per square meter (sqm) is approximately 16 US dollars (USD). The high cost makes it difficult for businesses to invest and adopt such real time indoor positioning systems due to investment in the Hardware (HW), Software (SW) as well as expenses due to recurrent operating, support and maintenance services cost.
Outdoor positioning is usually reliant on GNSS/GPS or Cellular (3GPP) and Non-Cellular (Lora/Sigfox) infrastructures.